Ferguson’s Freedom Summer?

Last Wednesday, Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator who spent a year in federal prison after pleading guilty, in 2009, to two felony counts of obstruction of justice, was lying in bed watching a video stream of the police in Ferguson responding to protests with military-style vehicles, rubber bullets, and gas masks. Prior to his incarceration (he was convicted of concealing an election-law violation), Smith had been a promising young Democrat—a Jewish kid from the wealthy St. Louis suburb of Olivette. He crossed Delmar Boulevard, the line that divides black from white in St. Louis, and ran a campaign that had him knocking on doors and playing pickup hoops in black neighborhoods. Now, removed from politics and living in New York City, where he works as a professor at the New School, he found himself sympathizing with the protesters, some of whom were likely his former constituents. Smith had been using social media, phone, and e-mail to put activists in touch with one another. At around 10 P.M. that Wednesday, he tweeted: “Lots of white St. Louisans asking me how they could help end this. They think i’m joking, but answer is obvious. Join the protests en masse.”

Replies from white people tended to fall into three categories: dismissive, delighted, and apprehensive. The members of this last group had heard, they said, that white protesters were not all that welcome in Ferguson. At the same time, Smith told me over Skype, “to a one, every black person who has responded to that tweet from St. Louis has told the fearful but sympathetic people, ‘Please come and join us. This won’t succeed without you—they’ll only listen if this thing is diverse.’ ”

“What we need is ten thousand white soldiers in the battle,” Smith continued. “Notice I said ‘soldiers,’ not ‘generals.’ We don’t need people with the drum-major impulse running up to the front of the parade.” (Here Smith was referring to a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr.) Smith estimates that there are about a million white people in the vicinity of Ferguson. “If just one in every hundred goes to Ferguson, there’s ten thousand white people at the protest, and the police aren’t responding with tear gas, rubber bullets, and dogs.”

The suggestion that the protesters in Ferguson would be better off with what would amount to white human shields is disturbing (and not without a paternalistic tinge), in part because Smith may be right. It is a sad and cynical compromise, but perhaps a pragmatic one.

Last Tuesday, I spoke with Floyd Johnson, the pastor of Wellspring Church, in Ferguson. In addition to his normal work of organizing services and outreach, he has been helping to set up a safe space for students of the local schools, whose opening has been delayed. Johnson said that he had seen many white protesters, both at the daytime rallies and in the nighttime clashes with police. “We all have this responsibility,” he told me. “This is not a time for anyone to be quiet. Nor is it a time to quibble, to raise trivial critique or interjection based on issues that are micro. We have a macro problem now, and it will take everyone, no matter who they are, wrestling with it to get anywhere.”

“Frankly,” he continued, “if there’s someone who thinks racism doesn’t exist because there was a civil-rights movement, they’re wrong. All of this is on a continuum, so everyone has a responsibility to respond and work for the restoration of this community.”

Johnson’s sentiments were echoed by Jennifer Haro, a white protester who has been in Ferguson since last Thursday. “At a minimum, white people who feel outrage over what’s happened need to show up,” Haro said in an e-mail. “No one in Ferguson’s told me to go home. Quite the contrary . . . White police are treating black citizens unfairly, and that probably won’t change until white people care enough to show up as allies to demand otherwise.”

This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Summer, when more than a thousand volunteers, mostly white students from élite Northern colleges, went down to Mississippi to help an even greater number of local activists register black voters. They endured a violent backlash from the local police, the media, and the Ku Klux Klan, who, working with the police, murdered three of the volunteers. The deaths of the volunteers—James Chaney, who was black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were white—made front-page headlines throughout the country and helped to change voting laws in the South. “If my son had been alone, nothing would have been done,” Chaney’s mother said afterward. “Two white boys were killed, so they did something about the killing of my child who was with them.” Rita Schwerner, the wife of Michael Schwerner, echoed Chaney’s mother’s despair: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.”

Smith, for his part, acknowledges the theoretical problems with his idea but also sees a better path out. “The root of what’s going on in Ferguson is people who feel disconnected with the community at large. White people, who are the majority in the region, need to tell young black men that they are part of the community,” he told me. “The presence of thousands of whites would help black youths understand that the broader community cares about them, values their bodies and their lives.”